seemed
to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of nature, which
avenged rashness by a headache, and, like nature's good sense, might be
depended upon.

Rachel went to bed; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her, for a very
long time, but at length, waking from a transparent kind of sleep, she
saw the windows white in front of her, and recollected that some time
before she had gone to bed with a headache, and that Helen had said it
would be gone when she woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now
quite well again. At the same time the wall of her room was painfully
white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat. Turning
her eyes to the window, she was not reassured by what she saw there. The
movement of the blind as it filled with air and blew slowly out, drawing
the cord with a little trailing sound along the floor, seemed to her
terrifying, as if it were the movement of an animal in the room. She
shut her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each
thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead with a little
stab of pain. It might not be the same headache, but she certainly had a
headache. She turned from side to side, in the hope that the coolness
of the sheets would cure her, and that when she next opened her eyes
to look the room would be as usual. After a considerable number of vain
experiments, she resolved to put the matter beyond a doubt. She got out
of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball at the end of the
bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of her
hand, and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of the
floor proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk
than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change was
refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the
discomfort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have
to stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head on the pillow,
relinquished the happiness of the day.

When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped her cheerful
words, looked startled for a second and then unnaturally calm, the fact
that she was ill was put beyond a doubt. It was confirmed when the whole
household knew of it, when the song that some one was singing in the
garden stopped suddenly, and when Maria, as she brought water, slipped
past the bed with averted eyes. There was all the morning to get
th